Ian Coller— O Lydian lord of many nations, foolish Croesus,Wish not to hear the longed-for voice within your palace,Even your son’s voice: better for you were it otherwise;For his first word will he speak on a day of sorrow.—Herodotus A Lydian prince, born mute, miraculously acquires the power of speech
Panikos Panayi— On March 24, 2020, Luca Di Nicola, a nineteen-year-old Italian-born chef working in London, died at the North Middlesex Hospital, one of the many thousands of people falling victim to coronavirus in London, Britain, and the world beyond. Luca had moved to work in the city’s massive service
Stephen G. Fritz— Life is normally characterized by irony, paradox, ambiguity, and ambivalence, but Adolf Hitler saw it with a startling (and frightening) clarity. Beginning early in his career as an orator and political rabble-rouser, he habitually used history as an explanation and justification for his actions. He had, indeed,
Jonathan Bate— During the great pandemic lockdown, people on Twitter have been “dreaming of other places”—beautiful places that they remember and of which they have treasured photographs. What they are really dreaming of is other times, happier times, special memories. William Wordsworth, whose 250th anniversary falls on April 7, was
Stella Tillyard— On a bleak spring evening in 1741 a crowd gathered in a dark, narrow London street. At its edge well-to-do City merchants on their way westward through Hatton Garden mingled with the wretched and curious poor, washed up from tenements to the north, east, and south, looking for
Kim A. Wagner— A traveller alighting at Amritsar railway station in April 1919, after the train came to a jerking halt along the third-of-a-mile-long narrow platform, would have been met by much the same scene as described by Rudyard Kipling: ‘the station filled with clamour and shouting, cries of water
David Denby— Ben Hecht was not religious in any way, and ignored such Jewish organizations as the Anti-Defamation League and political causes in general. He was a nonjoiner, a skeptic, a man indifferent to the world’s suffering. But in 1937 and 1938, as the threats to the European Jews grew
Giambattista Vico— Wisdom is the faculty that commands all the disciplines; by these, all the sciences and arts that complete our humanity are apprehended. Plato defines wisdom as that which is the perfecter of man. Man, in the being proper to him as a man, is nothing other than mind and
Christophe Guilluy— Amid a fanfare of republican self-congratulation, France has embraced globalization in all its glory. Wherever one looks, from the chronic alternation between traditional parties of the center left and center right to the denial of democracy itself, with the farcical referendum of 2005 on a European constitution, it
James Livesey— The history of the self is vitally important, and the contrast between the French and British histories is highly instructive. The self, or at least the version of the self as self-determining individual, is the postulate of every variety of liberalism and its institutions, and it is clear